Femspec Articles

Bogstad's review of Elizabeth Ann Leonard's collection Into Darkness Peering: Race and Color in the Fantastic, Number 74, Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Westport, CT: Greenwood 1997, 95 pp) commends the volume for remarkable feats in the history of science fiction criticism.

This brief introduction to the journal explains why the women writers and critics felt a need to begin an interdisciplinary journal. One reason for this need to create the journal was a common feeling of being alienated as writers in male-dominated publishing circles.

This writer from the 1930s was similar to modern feminists. The story set in the twenty-fourth century includes introspection on prophecies of the past through the mechanism of old books that had been discovered from the turn of the 20th century by the protagonist.

A very short poem of what a fish might look like if it was out of water, playing on images of male and female, and of a male trying to relate to a female being like a fish out of water.

Depiction of WinoWoman on a street in Philadelphia, with references to the mythic Harriet Tubman's feet and other aspects of celebration.

Pike's review of Laurence Schimel, ed., Things Invisible to see: Gay and Lesbian Tales of Magical Realism (Cambridge, MA: Circlet Press, 1998, paper, 12.95) explores domains in which gender and desire are flexible, using the concept of border land communities.

The poem Juneteenth speaks about Pittsburgh during a jazz era with characters like SuperHighFlier. In Word Worlds the poet creates visions of similarities existing between the jungle and the city using metaphors that connect earthy atmospheric qualities with the emotions of street life. In Taboo the poet creates a primitive world of the jungle and the same poet creates a lyric sense in Imagine.

The critique made is that popular shows on television are reactionary products of a culture that treats women as sex objects. The episodes of Star Trek critiqued in the journal are about how the feminist movement coincided with the sexist illustration of women in the television. Watching these Star Trek episodes will reveal how icons of American culture can express popular American ideologies.

A girl's SF by a nine year old in 1961 is a young work that FEMSPEC sometimes includes. Since “girls have the same fantasies of omni potence and infinite transformation boys do,” a nine year old girl shows the early attention to the joys of space invasion.Her "found" fiction contains three yellow people: Sunny, Beamer, and Ray, aliens equipped with an English dictionary.

Mexico provides a surreal surrounding for painters to experience new visions. Tichenor's artistic conceptions are not European. The artist makes an analogy about past practices of shamans and unexplainable phenomena in her art work. Her artwork glows in a radiating way that is un-natural. Tichenor's revealing artwork lets us see ordinary human beings unmasked.

A doctoral candidate in organizational behavior from Case Western Reserve covers the Third International Congress on sex and gender held at Oxford University. She discusses intersexual individuals reported on by Lee Anderson Brown of Sydney, and explores sources that might inspire artistic representations of gender that might be more experimental for creators of future gender bending sci fi works.

WisCon 22 and the Secret Feminist Cabal by William Clemente is a conference and convention coverage piece on pages 110 and 111.This convention at Concourse Hotel in Madison, Wisconsin, Memorial Day Weekend, 1998, was for about 600 writers and readers of sf and feminism. As stated:"You don't just get feminism at WisCon, you get thoughtful social analysis" (110).

This is a work of fiction that starts out by showing marriage (sex) as being the way to let out one's true passion and true self. The use of subtle magical realism helps the author to tell of the enjoyable and the frightening aspects that co-exist while experiencing sex within the marriage.

This is a review of a conference in Canada where Canadian Science fiction was discussed. SF, Canadian literature was looked at in the context of all Canadian literature, and then with the concept of "borders" as creating regional identities. Many Canadian authors and works were discussed including Nalo Hopkinson, who performed an unpublished piece of hers.

This is a review of a conference in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where the theme was Utopias/Dystopias. Hetrotopic and biocentric themes are also discussed.

This article discusses how cultural information and stories have been passed from one generation to the next. The fairy tales were restructured to focus more on the female's point of view. Some of these include stories with mothers and no fathers, depicting feminism and imagination in one.

This play includes two characters who are a married couple. The wife sees an angel. The husband tries to find something about angels in the Bible, while the wife defines revelation for him. She claims that the whole point of a revelation is to introduce something new. Gender differences are noted when reacting to the same situation.

Penelope Rosemont's Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, is discussed. This collection contains writings and some visual work by approximately one hundred women from all over the world. These surrealist women are also talked about as being political activists.

This is a review of a meeting that took place during a conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. People from across the country gathered to discuss the progress of the FEMSPEC journal and how they became interested in working on it. Ideas for future editions were also discussed.

Judith Laura's novel, Goddess Spirituality for the 21st Century, and Treena Kortje's novel, Variations of Eve, are discussed. Laura is claimed to have spent a great deal of time and effort searching for original gender classifications in the bible. Kortje's novel describes many possible stories of Eve and the garden of Eden.

Using the concepts of Eutopia and Dystopia to describe the extremes of utopias, Brian Attebery's article "Women Alone, Men Alone: Single-Sex Utopias" examines the revivification of utopian fiction since the 1950s. By coining the term masculinist as a linguistic parallel to feminist, Attebery provides useful terms for discussion of utopia and gender in new ways.

This is a review of a morning workshop, called "Writers' Respite," that took place a conference in Madison, Wisconsin. New SF writers were brought face to face with experienced writers in order to help guide them to future success.

Two short stories by Native American Stephanie Sellers. She tells the story of a mythic coyote who wants to give birth. When Nurse I'm-in-Charge rammed the wires to the heart monitor up Coyote's vagina, she ordered him to stop screaming. "Good girls deliver quietly," she told him.

This analysis examines two literary narratives by Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) that elucidate the intersection of three fields in Western thought: the notion of utopia, feminist politics and theory, and feminist science fiction.

La Carte de Tendre or the Map of the country of Tenderness can be viewed as a precursor of many board games, and, one might also claim that it foreshadows certain contemporary computer games. However, I see it more as a map of Mlle. De Scudery’s desire, and of the emotional geography of the territory of her political ambition and her sexual imagination.